Johnny’s Tutorial | Tips n’ Tricks

Today we had a workshop with new tutor Johnny. Johnny specialises in animation but is very strong in graphic design. Every Tuesday for the next four weeks, he will take a workshop regarding indesign. Today was our first session, however it was not so much on indesign, and more so on Illustrator.

Johnny started off by telling us the importance of grids. Grids really help to structure your work, and keep everything aligned. It is always useful to include grids within your design, because it allows your work to be seen from a different perspective. By having grids, does not mean you have to stick to them. You can also use them to break away from the system, like designer David Carson. Sometimes, it can look better for everything not to be perfectly aligned. \

Usually, I would create grids within indesign because it is really user friendly, however, Johnny said that it is quite good to get into the habit of creating grids on Illustrator. This is because it can be much less time consuming and when working on a short brief be an ideal way of working. Johnny showed us how it sets up his document. Firstly, if he is creating a print based document, he will include a bleed- this can be 3mm-5mm. He then created a square and using the align tool, showed us how we can create a basic grid structure.

Johnny stated that he found simpler grids always appeared to work better than complicated ones.In illustrator, we made a spaced grid by 20×20 pixels squares, aligning to art board and using the vertical align to top tool for the first row. To even space the grid across the art board, we used the distribute spacing tool horizontally and vertically. Johnny also told us that to kern type on Illustrator, you can simply highlight the text whilst pressing alt and move through the left and right keys. Generally, this tutorial was quite useful, however it didn’t seem to last that long and we didn’t get much computer time.